Use character string as object name in operations

Question

I am all too inexperienced in programming generally and R specifically so please forgive me if what I have is bad coding.

The problem I am trying to solve is to load many separate csv files into R, tidy up the input a bit, perform a few operations on the resulting objects and eventually plot the results of those operations. The way I have tried to solve it is to use a vector of strings which echoes the object names to call the objects in question. This does not work.

Below is a bit of code which after loading the data does not work.

files=list.files('foldername',pattern="*.csv",full.names=F) #Make a list of files
filen=str_extract(files, '.*(?=\\.csv)') #Pretty the file names for object names

for (i in 1:length(files)){
   assign(paste(filen[i]),read.csv(paste(files[i]))) #Load the files
   as.object(filen[i])=as.object(filen[i])[,order(names(ATCN_21))] # pseudocode line
   as.object(filen[i])=operation(as.object(filen[i]),parameter 1, parameter 2, etc) #More pseudocode
}

where operation may be a plot command or an arbitrary function such as rbind, colnames, whatever you may fancy.

In other words: I need some way to use string i in vector filen exactly as if it were an object name. How can I do this?

Answer 1

The solution: Lists. (Thank you, Pierre)

files=list.files('foldername',pattern="\\.csv$",full.names=F) #Make a list of files
filen=str_extract(files, '.*(?=\\.csv)') #Pretty the file names for object names

list=lst()


for (i in 1:length(files)){
   lst[[i]]=read.csv(paste(files[i]))#Load the files
   names(lst)[i]<-filen[i] #Name the entries
   lst[[i]]=lst[[i]][,order(names(lst[[i]]))]

   lst[[i]]=operation(foo)
}

Thank you for helping a clueless n00b.